The sociolinguistic constraints on the Quotative system: British English and US English compared

The recent advent and rapid spread of two new vernacular options, go and like, within the (say) variable has attracted a growing body of research in variationist sociolinguists. This thesis examines the synchronic functions of these new quotatives and considers pragmatic, discourse, and social factors. The investigation is based on an analysis of very large corpora of spontaneous spoken British and American English. This cross-variety comparison gives me the opportunity (i) to investigate a case of rapid language change that is happening concurrently with the time of research and (ii) to consider to what extent social and linguistic constraints hold globally.A variationist study of the constraints which govern the quotative system is valuable for the following reasons: By investigating the patterning of the (say) variable as a whole, we gain insights into the rule-governed variability of innovative features and their rival variants (say, tell, think, cry, ...). A look at the entire quotative system reveals the intimate interplay of competing choices within the (say) variable. My project aims at understanding how the system as a whole reacts to the intrusion of newcomer variants. A sharply delimited and hitherto stable set of variants - such as the (say) variable - presents the unique opportunity to investigate the restructuring of all variants as new ones come in. This is especially interesting when we look at competing choices which have the same [- canonical] underlying semantic feature, such as unframed quotes. The data show that far from ousting the unframed or say-variant, like and go add options within the vernacular categoryA comparative study on the patterning of non-canonical variants within the quotative pool produces important insights into phenomena such as reallocation, competition within one socio-pragmatic field, as well as interaction of variants ii within the same variable. In this light, the restructuring of all quotative variants during the rapid intrusion of the robust new variant like gives us an important test-case for various explanatory parameters for language change that have been raised in the literature, i.e. Romaine's claims about language and gender (2003), the reallocation hypothesis as raised by Britain (2002) and Britain and Trudgill (1999), the reformulation of the standard vs. non-standard dichotomy into local vs. supra-local variants by Foulkes and Docherty (1999) and the Milroys' findings (1998) concerning network and class.Furthermore, research in variationist sociolinguistics has revealed the importance of intralinguistic constraints in situations of competing grammars (Meyerhoff 2000, Preston 1991, Rickford and MacNair-Knox 1994). Using a synthetic approach which looks at both intralinguistic and extralinguistic constraints, I attempt to explain the variability at all levels within the variable in order to account for as much of the variability as possible. Investigation into an array of linguistic factors reveals that linguistic constraints on the members of the (say) variable are indeed very important and quite robust.A cross-variety comparison gives insights into how much we can generalize our findings: do locally separate systems handle the situation in the same way? The comparison of pragmatic and sociolinguistic factors reveals some interesting but subtle differences in go's and tike's development in different locales. This raises more fundamental linguistic questions, such as are whether we are indeed comparing the same variable in the US and in Britain. My findings give evidence of the restructuring processes in the quotative system as a whole that accompany the arrival of a newcomer variant, like, in two varieties, British English and US English. There is evidence that different systems find idiosyncratic solutions to similar problems. This finding constitutes an important contribution to the growing body of research on globalisation phenomena and supra-local trends (Buchstaller 2003, Kerswill 2003, Meyerhoff and Niedzielski 2003, Tagliamonte and Hudson 1999, Trudgill 1983, 1994, and many others)

Mapping the linguistic landscapes of the Marshall Islands

This paper examines code choices in the written linguistic landscape of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). Due to a history of language imposition, the Marshall Islanders have long been denied the opportunity to express their linguistic identity in the public domain. A recently proposed bilingual language policy, which requires all public signs to be Marshallese-English bilingual, aims to change this status quo. We map language choices in the linguistic landscape of the RMI at the cusp of this policy with an eye on the stakeholders, production processes, and audiences involved in the creation and reception of the linguistic landscape. State-of-the-art geographical and regression analyses model the factors that govern code choices in the linguistic landscape of the RMI. Our findings allow us to pinpoint niches - both geographical as well as social - where the Marshallese assert their linguistic identity in the public realm

Towards a taxonomy of arguments for and against street renaming: Exploring the discursive embedding of street name changes in the Leipzig cityscape

In 2016, a special issue of the Linguistic Landscapes: An International Journal explored the nexus between LL and collective memory studies, calling for more research at the interface of these disciplines. Our analysis adds to recent studies by exploring the ways in which commemorative street renaming processes are discursively embedded. We build on research on memorialisation as well as critical toponymy to analyse media discourses that accompany, support or contest commemorative naming practices in the urban streetscape of a large East German city during the last century. Based on this dataset, we develop a typology of arguments against or in favour of street renaming. The longitudinal analysis of discourses in the local press vis-à-vis ongoing resemioticisation reveals a complex relationship between lived political history, freedom of the press, the type of argument and the stances encoded therein

Towards an Empirically-based Model of Age-graded Behaviour: Trac(ing) linguistic malleability across the entire adult life-span

Previous panel research has provided individual evidence for aspects of the U-shaped pattern, but these studies typically rely on sampling the same speaker at two points in time, usually in close proximity. As a result, our knowledge about the patterning of age-graded variables across the entire adult life-span is limited. What is needed, thus, is a data-set that captures ongoing linguistic malleability in the individual speaker across all “life experiences that give age meaning” (Eckert 1997:167). Our study is the first to add real time evidence across the lifespan as a whole on an age-graded variable. We present the results of a novel dynamic data-set that allows us to model speakers’ linguistic choices between ages 19 and 78. We illustrate the age-graded patterns in our data and draw attention to the complex, socially niched ways in which speakers react to age-specific expectations

Changes in the Commemorative Streetscape of Leipzig over the past 100 years

This paper presents the results of an interdisciplinary project which explores street name changes in Leipzig, a city in Eastern Germany, over the past 100 years. Our analysis focuses on the ways in which semantic choices in the streetscape are recruited to canonise traces of the national past that are “supportive of the hegemonic socio-political order” (Azaryahu 1997:480). We triangulate results from variationist sociolinguistics, Linguistic Landscape (LL) studies and geographical analysis to visualise waves of street (re)naming during a century of political turmoil. Drawing on historical archival data allows us to interpret spatial and temporal patterns of odonymic choices as the public embodiment of subsequent political state ideologies. The analysis provides quantitative and longitudinal support to Scollon & Scollon’s (2003) claim that the indexing of officially sanctioned identity and ideology as well as the appropriation of human space are performed by and in turn index state-hegemonic politics of memory

Ideology in the linguistic landscape: Towards a quantitative approach

Past approaches to ideological commemorative street naming have taken for granted the concept of ideology, focusing on the policy decisions and the debates surrounding individual and more concerted resemioticisations. In this paper, we demonstrate that the concept of ideology in the context of commemorative street renaming is by no means unequivocal by illustrating how different decisions on what is or is not an ideological street name change influences the shape and the scope of ‘the ideological robe of the city’ (Zieliński, 1994). More specifically, we report on methodological decisions and their implications for representational politics in two towns, Zbąszyń in Poland and Annaberg-Buchholz in Germany, during consecutive waves of regime changes since the First World War. We rely on a complex data-set consisting of maps, town hall documents, street directories, newspapers and interviews with administrative officials. Visualisation of geographical patterns allows us to illustrate the outcomes of different definitions of ideology and explore how these definitions affect our analysis. Our primary aim is to arrive at systematic, and thus supra-locally operationalizable, analytical procedure for distinguishing ideological from non-ideological street naming practices

Commemorative cityscapes: spatio-temporal patterns in street names in Leipzig, East Germany and Poznań, Poland

This article contributes to research on commemorative naming strategies by presenting a comparative longitudinal study on changes in the urban toponymy of Leipzig (Germany) and Poznań (Poland) over a period of 102 years. Our analysis combines memory studies, Linguistic Landscape (LL) research and critical toponymy with GIS visualization techniques to explore (turnovers in) naming practices across time and space. The key difference between the two localities lies in the commemorative pantheon of referents – events, people, and places inscribed as traces of a hegemonic national past – that are replaced when commemorative priorities change. Other patterns are common to both study sites. Notably, in both Poznań and Leipzig, peaks of renaming occur at the threshold of regime change, after which commemorative renaming activity subsides. We report on our findings and propose methodological guidelines for analyzing street renaming from a longitudinal, transnational and interdisciplinary perspective